For most of the year, it’s just too damn early to get up and out in time to get good sunrise photos. But the winter is a different story. While in Vancouver, B.C. last week, I noticed on my phone that sunrise wasn’t until around...
The truly magisterial thing about life is that, when you wake up each morning, you can never be completely certain about what the day has in store for you. This applies to President Obama, Pope Francis, a weird guy I hired to rake leaves at...
Crispin Scott’s semester abroad in Barcelona was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime. But on January 6, 2012, the night before he was to attend the program’s orientation session, the handsome 20-year-old math major and rugby star at Dartmouth met a tragic fate....
When it comes to barbers, I’ve never been very monogamous. Oh sure, I’ve had some good barbers whom I was faithful to for periods of time over the years. But something always comes between us—a long line of others waiting for the same guy, a...
Until I injured my knee playing tennis a month ago, I used to be one of Bend’s FitBit People. Now I’ve joined the sedentary class . I know that some of the folks you see riding motorized scooters around big-box stores really need them. When...
I’m cheap and I don’t care as much about my appearance as I probably should. That’s why I don’t mind patronizing beauty schools, where you can get a haircut—and sometimes a shampoo—for as little as five bucks. It takes longer because the students often have...
Here’s a question I bet you haven’t given much thought to: why the bloody hell is sexually assaulting a dog only a MISDEMEANOR in Oregon? Behold this revolting story in the (Bend)Bulletin about this depraved couple who are accused of sexually abusing children and also,...
“ Free Pre-Paid Cremation! Details Inside" Purveyors of direct mail have many different ways to get you to open junk mail. The most common tactic is to create a sense of urgency. The actual verbiage can vary but the undertone is this: Open this fucking letter...
Visitors might wrongly assume that Bend is a bastion of crunchy, left-wing, kombucha swilling vegans who wear hemp, recycle toilet paper and look forward to listening to NPR’s Wait-Wait-Don’t Tell Me on weekends. After all, this is the small, outdoorsy city that shows up in...
“You got any trash for me?” asked the cute teenage girl at the Shell station dressed in an all-white 1950s soda-jerk style uniform. I thought I had heard her wrong. New to Oregon and its delightful law mandating that gas station attendants, not customers, pump the...